Why Top 40 Radio Needs to Revert to Billboard Charts to Represent Diverse Mainstream Music

Описание: The label Republic Records -- home to top artists including Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift -- on Friday vowed to ban the word "urban" as a generalization for hip-hop and R&B.

Many see it as an antiquated umbrella term -- it is still used to describe many awards at the Grammys -- that ignorantly lumps all music by black artists into the same grab-bag.

The label, a division of Universal, said it would remove "urban" from department names, employee titles and music genres.
Use of "urban" in music jargon dates back to the mid-1970s, according to Billboard, which says the black WBLS New York radio DJ Frankie Crocker used the phrase "urban contemporary."

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The change in charts used to calculate the top 40 also had a convenient side effect for station managers. Many of the songs that charted highly in the late ’80s and early ’90s were more erotic and too sexually explicit in nature to play on the radio because of broadcasting laws. Most of these songs, by happenstance, were also performed by black artists. Think: “Me So Horny” by 2 Live Crew, which hit No. 26 in 1989, “Cop Killer’ by Ice-T’s group Body Count, which hit No. 26 in 1992, and “The Humpty Dance” by Digital Underground, which hit No. 11 in 1990. All of these songs apparently caused such moral dilemmas for American Top 40 hosts that they refused to say some of their titles on-air, and gave them all radio edits. (In all fairness, this also happened with George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex” in 1987.)

Just two years later, though, in 1993 American Top 40 switched the chart it culled its list from to the Billboard Top 40 Mainstream chart (or the Pop chart). The Pop charts measured only the songs being played on top 40 radio stations, meaning that those stations were no longer subject to any list that they didn’t maintain themselves. The circle was complete. This allowed radio stations to control the chart they were presumably playing to show the tastes of America. Outside of countdown time slots (when the station literally counted down to the No. 1 song), the station could feature other music, which was then almost guaranteed to be a top 40 hit the next week because of the chart’s self-referentiality.

But unlike in previous decades where top 40 stations might have syndicated American Top 40 and then adjusted the rest of their airtime for their listeners, today, the majority of top 40 stations now are syndicated iHeart stations. iHeartRadio did not respond to requests for data. Fewer and fewer cities have their own top 40 anymore, much less their own DJs. On a Saturday, you can drive through several states without ever losing the signal for iHeartRadio’s top 40.

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